Readings: Acts 2:14a, 36-41 Luke 24:13-35
Two friends
walking a dusty road, returning home for what is the point of staying. They have heard the rumours of miracle from
the women but cannot believe them so they go home, weary and disheartened.
Talking, listening, sharing pain and confusion.
Another walks with
them, a stranger, looks into their eyes, listens to lost hopes and wild
rumours.
He speaks: they
hear the story of salvation as though for the first time, as they travel on.
They arrive: he
wants to go further on his way; they ask him to stay, as dusk falls on the
dusty road.
They go indoors,
sit, tired, at a table to share a meal – hospitality to one they don’t quite
want to let go. He takes bread, blesses
it, breaks it and offers it them – they see then who their companion is – but
he has gone.
They remember: the
journey, the words heard, the everyday presence of road, table and broken bread
– they know the news must be shared.
They cannot stay
put, but, here and now, they set out, back along the dusty road – feet getting
ahead of them in their excitement, two people on God’s way.
This narrative
from scripture of the two on the way to Emmaus is one of the most enticing and intriguing
stories of Gospel literature. It is also
one that I greet with expectation every time – for every time something new
presents itself.
We have these two
people – Cleopas and an unnamed other, who could well have been his wife –
trudging home in despair, they had gambled their hopes on this saviour and,
well, it ended back there on the cross.
We all know those
moments don’t we? We have had high hopes
– and they are dashed on the rocks. What
do we do? Find sanctuary, go home, get
back into normal routine and try to forget the crumbled hosannas and hallelujahs. T.S. Eliot in ‘The Cocktail Party’ succinctly
and insightfully describes the return to the human condition by those who have
travelled far in hope:
They may remember the vision they have had, but they
cease to regret it, maintain themselves by the common routine, learn to avoid
excessive expectation.
In the same way as
the people surrounding Peter in our reading from Acts are asking ‘What do we
do?’ so these two were facing how to respond to a vision, a hope that had
proved to be of excessive expectation.
And one of the
first things they did was to leave the despondent community and return to what
had been. Go home, hunker down, try and find some normality, get on with life. Even the astounding news from the women at
the empty tomb was not enough to penetrate their gloom.
So when a stranger
comes along and asks what’s wrong, the response is best described as a verbal
outburst – all the disappointed hopes and dashed expectations poured out.
I think we have
all at some stage in our lives had some kind of experience like this – where
our response is to retreat, to chastise our hearts for being so hopeful when
our head told us all along that it the odds were against us.
Sometimes we get
so that we won’t let any vision into our lives again – don’t want to get
disappointed like that again. So we at
best expect status quo and have no real hope that anything will change for the
better in the future. We lower our
sights – I may have told some of you that when I was a student here at the
university my academic record was not exactly inspiring after my first
year. So when I came to try again I
remember going to see the results under the archway at the registry and having
looked through the c passes for my subject went away disappointed that I had
failed. It wasn’t until a friend
congratulated me that I realised I had passed with a better mark. I was all too ready for failure. That taught me to raise my sights – a little
anyway.
Then some of us
can be at that point where we are hearing and sharing the words of faith –
without recognising the very heart of the message. We are not listening,
engaging in conversation with God but rather with each other only. As the two
did not recognise Jesus, so we can be very good at the rhetoric, the debate,
the dogma and be blind to the way we are judging our fellow human beings, being
exclusive or moralistic or simply detached from the reality of need around us. The
head is well catered for, the heart is kept on a leash. Jesus came to those two on the road and the
passage says, ‘interpreted to them the things about himself in all the
scriptures.’ And they began to hear.
The interesting
question for us – what is it that prevents us from allowing the way of Jesus to
be a driving force in our lives – and you are listening here to someone who was
the world champion at holding a bit back, rationalising the need to stay
slightly detached, just in case. The Emmaus
experience has been mine a number of times - recognising who walks on this road
of faith with me and through whose eyes I must see and whose heart I must be. Without it I would not be here today.
I love that Jesus
seems to require the strongest urging to come into the home and eat with
them. Was it their sense of hospitality
that made them so insistent or maybe it was because the words of teaching of
this stranger were beginning to stir them in an exciting way? They wanted more, they no longer desired to
shut themselves off from community for they sensed something special was being
revealed.
And they were
right – there among the bread and the wine, the ordinary things of the table,
Jesus himself was recognised. And there
they had a name to put to this sense of – how did they put it – their hearts
burning within them as he opened the scriptures to them.
How could they
have not seen, not recognised the living Christ walking with them! Easily it seems.
So I guess the
first question for each of us is where we are in our Emmaus journey? Have we
left the empty tomb, disappointed, perplexed that our plans have come to
nothing. Are we on the road trudging
home, eyes so downcast that we do not see the Christ beside us? Or has the fire in our hearts been ignited,
even in the smallest way, to recognise and respond to the Christ with us.
And the second
question is what are we to do now? Like
the crowd that surrounded Peter, we too ask constantly for guidance and
direction, for interpretation of the scriptures through the teachings of
Jesus.
I don’t know about
you but I am over people using scripture to bolster their own agendas, to use
as a hammer of judgement or a badge of righteousness. Without Jesus at the heart of interpretation and
as the reason for walking this road of faith we can head off into all kinds of
blindness. As a church, as members of
that church, what are we doing that disgraces the teachings of Jesus, or shows
shallow understanding and limited vision?
And more importantly, what are we to do about it? Knowing who journeys with us, do we have the
courage to hear his interpretation and act on it with hope?
Do we live our
faith as a disappointed people avoiding excessive expectation or as a
resurrection people hearts burning with hope and vision of what can be when we
walk knowingly in the company of Jesus?
That is our challenge as we explore the Emmaus experience for each of us
today.
Hear the good
news, where ever we are at in our journey of faith Jesus gives us the light of the
gospels and the presence of the spirit to guide us, the courage of the empty cross to speak out
and to endure and the wisdom and love of community to encourage us. Thanks be to God.
Margaret Garland
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